Apr 9 Socci: The Apostolic Exhortation is a turning-point in Catholic Doctrine

Mortal sin is replaced with social sin and the door to Communion for the divorced and remarried is opened: the real sin is ignoring the poor.

by Antonio Socci

(Rorate Caeli)Was Cardinal Kasper right when he announced “the great revolution” a month ago? With the Apostolic Exhortation, Amoris laetitia is Bergoglio overturning the Magisterium of the Church, thus putting himself above the words of Christ and God’s commandments?

With words he says he is not changing doctrine. But with facts he has today opened up to something that until now has been forbidden by Holy Scripture and the Church.

An operation of “double-truth” is hidden in the ambiguity of vague and misleading declarations. Why? Is it to camouflage the “revolution”, given that the law of God cannot be overturned in the Church?

Yes, it is. However, mostly with cautious gradualism: the ‘boiled frog’ strategy is being applied to the Church. A frog thrown into a pot of boiling water would jump out immediately. If, instead, it is put into a pot of tepid water which is gradually heated up, it ends up being boiled without being aware of it.

So little by little for months now, we have been witnessing the continuous demolition of Catholic doctrine. Each day a new blow. In the end the Church will be driven to melt into a sort of United Nations of religions, with a touch of Greenpeace and the Cgil (an Italian Labour Union).

I repeat – it was Cardinal Kasper who spoke of a “first step” in the “revolution” and he was also the one used by Bergoglio at the Consistory in February 2014 to throw the “bomb” of Communion for the divorced and remarried.

This “revolution” is being carried out by cancelling the notion of “mortal sin”. Cardinal Mueller correctly warned: “The greatest scandal the Church can give is not that there are sinners inside Her, [it is that of] ceasing to name the difference between good and evil, making them relative; i.e. ceasing to explain what sin is or claiming to justify it so as to have greater closeness and mercy towards the sinner.”

John Paul II had explained that the Church’s greatest maternal charity is precisely to sound the warning about sin and the risk of damnation.

This should be the Pope’s fundamental mission: Jesus Christ’s mandate to Peter is that of “confirming the brethren in the faith” not to confuse, destabilize and mislead. But this is the age of Bergoglio. Cardinal Mueller, custodian of the faith, in an interview to a Die Zeit journalist three months ago, said he didn’t believe Bergoglio was a heretic, but added: “ [It is] something completely different when a teaching of the Church officially presented, is expressed perhaps in an unfortunate, misleading or vague manner.”

Considering the Cardinal’s role, these words seem like enormous boulders. Being “misleading” means leading astray. And is a misleading Pope admissible?

Furthermore, this Exhortation shows that this misleading ambiguity is not an involuntary accident, but a precise strategy. So much so, that yesterday a heated debate erupted over the Exhortation’s interpretations due to the vagueness of the text and its clamorous contradictions.

So confusion is being fomented by the Pope himself, who, according to the Gospel, should be obliged to speak with absolute clarity. “But let your speech” Jesus commands “be yea, yea: no, no: and that which is over and above these, is of evil.” (Matt. 5, 37).

In contrast to this, today the double-track and double-truth are manifest seeing that the Bergoglio Party on the ‘home front’ is trying to reassure the faithful by insisting that nothing is being changed (why then shake up the Church for two years and now produce a document of 260 pages?), while outside [the Church] they are playing a fanfare about an “epochal turning-point”.

Indeed, all of the secular ultra–Bergoglian newspapers are celebrating with these headlines “The Synod, the opening of Pope Francis: possible Communion for the divorced and remarried (Repubblica.it) ; “The Pope opens up to Sacraments for the remarried” (Corriere.it).

Why doesn’t Pope Bergoglio order Father Lombardi to refute these newspaper interpretations, seeing that he sent him speedily to deny the trite gossip regarding his physical health? Is it not more important to defend the faith from eventual misinterpretation than to refute health problems?

A perfect example of this refined ambiguity was the embarrassing press conference for the presentation of the Exhortation, conducted by Cardinal Schonborn , who tried to defend an untenable position for two hours.

It is the double-truth that dominates today in the Vatican. Here we have a clamorous example of it in the text of the Exhortation. In order to claim – in words – that nothing is being changed in doctrine , Bergoglio had to remind us in some way, of the condition the Church has allowed up until now, for the divorced and remarried to receive Communion: on the condition that they live “like brother and sister.” It was this key passage in John Paul’s Familiaris consortio that should have been central to Bergoglio’s Exhortation, had it been in continuity with the perennial Magisterium. Yet Bergoglio doesn’t even mention this rule in the text but relegates it to a marginal note (n.329) and immediately afterwards demolishes it saying that without certain “intimacies” , “faithfulness” would be compromised.

From this we can deduce that for Bergoglio there is no longer any difference between families and irregular couples; on the contrary, there are no longer any irregular situations and it is no longer possible to say that they are considered per se, mortal sin. This is the crucial point. In fact, even if it is not explicitly said that such a couple can be admitted to sacramental Communion, it is understood that it will be conceded “case by case”.

De facto, the Exhortation contradicts the letter and the spirit on justification of the Council of Trent, the Dogmatic Constitution, Lumen gentium (Vatican II) and John Paul II’s encyclical on morality, Veritatis splendor.

In point of fact, it does not place being in a state of Grace and the salvation of souls (the supreme law of the Church) as an absolute good, but rather places social, sociological and sentimental considerations, thus gravely deluding and deceiving the faithful about the state of their soul before God, consequently placing their salvation in grave jeopardy.

Bergoglio avoids talking about “the moral law”, which the Church has condensed for centuries in dogmas and canonical dispositions, or he depicts it contemptuously as something “abstract” which cannot be applied to “concrete” situations. In doing so, he arrives at contesting Jesus Himself in His clash with the Pharisees on the question of divorce (Mat. 19, 3-12). In fact Bergoglio asserts that: “a far too abstract and almost artificial theological ideal of marriage, far removed from the concrete situations and practical possibilities of real families” (36) must not be proposed. This would be “excessive idealization”. Even worse: “there is no need to lay upon two limited persons the tremendous burden of having to reproduce perfectly the union existing between Christ and His Church” (122).

In compensation, Bergoglio introduces new grave sins. Those of the so-called “rigorists”, guilty of remembering God’s law, but most of all, those [of individuals] who don’t share his political ideas on social questions.

At no.186, Bergoglio finally remembers St. Paul’s passage which calls for the receiving of the Body of Christ in a worthy manner “otherwise one eats and drinks his own condemnation”. Yet, in explaining what “a worthy manner” means he doesn’t say “in a state of Grace” as the Church has always taught. He does not sound a warning to couples in a state of mortal sin, but to families that are closed up in their own comfort…who are indifferent when faced with the sufferings of poor and needy families.”

The moral sins are in this way reduced. Bergoglio introduces social sins (or socialist ones).

It would seem then, that those who don’t share his ideas on immigration should be wary of receiving the Eucharist.